• Zess@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    This is what they do in real life too though. They know the US is mostly liberal (based on the popular vote) so they have to abuse money and historical power to manipulate the votes into their favor.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      3 months ago

      “Ignore morality and get shit done”, aka The Ends Justify The Means

      - God or something, probably?

  • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Counter argument: Reddit is predominately American. These upvote sites use low cost foreign slave labor to generate their output. Buying upvotes is outsourcing jobs. Keep Reddit American. Don’t buy upvotes!

  • OpenStars@discuss.online
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    3 months ago

    Gasp, you all surely don’t believe that conservatives would ever engage in voter manipulation tactics… r-r-right!?

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        3 months ago

        This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they’ll never need to do so ever again.

        One election, to rule them all… and in the darkness bind them

  • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    There absolutely no way this isn’t an ad for upvote buying services lol this is so insane and transparent and the worst part is it’ll work

    • spacesatan@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Have to respect someone getting in on grifting conservatives without even endorsing their views in the process.

      • Saleh@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        In this case they do very much help those views though. Either they create the appearance of public appeal, which draws more people to these views, or they manage to disrupt spaces that formerly fostered a different political culture.

        If we look at Twitter we see the second aspect particularly strongly.

      • Wrench@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Honestly, there’s and endless sea of grift attempts going on at all times. You don’t think people selling fake gold Trump coins, etc give one damn about his politics, do you? They’re just trying to wring every penny out of the die hards

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          3 months ago

          I have to respect the mall t-shirt kiosks selling poorly made trump merch right next to the equally poorly made Kamala merch. At least they’re just there for the hustle

          • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Right? I was going to sell 5g blockers online when the pandemic started, but I have some semblance of a conscience… Also my wife threatened to leave me if I did.

        • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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          3 months ago

          Last presidential election here in Brazil there were some some traffic light salesman selling towels with the presidential candidates. And they walked around with a score board showing which one had sold more. And they sold a lot more because people didn’t want to see their beloved candidate on the losing side.

    • apt8@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Thats exactly what I believe. I know there is no limits to stupidity, but don’t you use bots to make it seem legit? Who would go around saying, “hey guys we’re losing. We should use BOTS. We should buy BOTS ACCOUNT AND UPVOTES from BOTSFORSALE.org

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I mean, it’s an ad but it’s also thought-provoking and interesting. Before now we all knew what was happening we just didn’t know the details also kind of interesting to see proof it’s a conversation starter. I think I would have preferred it if the author would have redacted the URL though.

  • Soup@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    “Our opinions are wildly unpopular to the point where even if a bunch of us showed up we’d struggle to make a difference so we’re gunna need to buy upvotes!”

    Like…c’mon.

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.

      Money!

        • OpenStars@discuss.online
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          3 months ago

          Eric Trump says “what?!”

          img

          And this after his father would have made 8 times more money by simply leaving it in the bank than all of his variety of hotel and Sharper Image steak sales businesses - he’s literally the only one I’ve ever heard of who managed to lose money running a casino!

          “The system” is what makes wealth, not individual people these days. Obviously not solely, but the above example shows how it is the primary determination factor.

      • Emerald@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’d argue they do have organizational skills and and strength in numbers. Don’t underestimate that.

    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      The hope, I imagine, is that conservative subs are safe spaces where dissent can be controlled, and with enough purchased engagement, these posts can reach the front page where all the normal people gather.

  • Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Everyone with a Reddit account, let’s sell upvotes to conservatives on Jordan_Peterson_Memes. It’s income redistribution with zero impact.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?

    I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.

    Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn’t like got buried really fast.

    Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn’t care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.

    Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I’ll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)

    So that’s what killed Digg. …that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (…insert comparison to modern Reddit here)

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Thanks for the quick lesson

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That’s only part of what killed Digg. The final nail in the coffin was when they redesigned the website to give power users even more power to control the front page than they already had.

      • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

        Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.

        So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

        Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

        Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.

        Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.

        • gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          lmao even if that happens i fucking bet NOTHING will change. too many people are just addicted to the site and even if it does we’ll just get an overload of turbo-redditors here

    • Clbull@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I don’t remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg’s social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.

      IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.

      Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg’s front-page, but they didn’t have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.

    • auzy@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That’s not what happened at all imho.

      What killed digg realistically is that it had less control than Reddit and because Kevin Rose blocked posts about the DVD encryption codes and people over reacted to that block. For days digg was full of people simply reposting them (as Digg was worried about getting sued which was fair enough)

      Didn’t really have anything to do with politics.

      Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great

      Digg admins were actually ok and I never had an issue with them

      • ameancow@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great

        Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their “rights” and “censorship.”

        By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.

        I don’t even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010’s and beyond.

  • vga@sopuli.xyz
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    3 months ago

    I’m not terribly against stealing money from maga dumb idiots with too much money.